A True Patriot Understands the Need for Dissent

I am the mother of a Gulf War-era Navy veteran, but as this war rages on, I see an ugly reminder of the past: People who are against the war, or are critical of President Bush, are being accused of being unpatriotic.

Some Republicans are accusing Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who served in the military, of a lack of patriotism for criticizing the rush to war. And I'm also troubled when the first lady Laura Bush cancelled a poetry festival after she learned that many poets were against the war. In the past, the label of unpatriotic was often leveled against people -- often black activists -- who did not agree with the prevailing ideology of the government.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was called unpatriotic, and a communist to boot. The Black Panthers, whose espousal of the right to bear arms to protect their neighborhoods sounded eerily like NRA arguments for the same right, were considered enemies of the state and hunted down. In 1966 and '67, during the early years of the Vietnam War, black soldiers died in numbers that exceeded their representation in the population.

Black people suffered 23 percent of the fatalities even though they were 11 percent of the nation's population, according to journalist Wallace Terry. In his book "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans," Terry wrote that by 1969, blacks comprised 14 percent of the fatalities. During those years, I had classmates who were drafted, and one of my favorite cousins came back in 1969 with most of his hearing gone.

These young men were carrying on the tradition of their fathers and other blacks who served in the military even though they faced segregation and discrimination at home and in the services. My son got valuable training for the future while he was in the service for four years. My father married my mother in his Army paratrooper's uniform. He was a member of the famous all-black "Triple Nickel" unit in the late 1940s. And all my uncles served in the military. Two fought in the Korean War, and another enlisted in the Air Force, became an aeronautical engineer and was a lieutenant colonel when he retired.

Nowadays, despite, the well-known sacrifices of the past, there are questions from Democratic and Republican lawmakers and military sociologists about how blacks are participating in the military. This time it is because they are volunteering for jobs in the military that keep them away from the front lines, but provide them with better job training for their future lives as civilians. Black men and women comprise 21 percent of our military while we are roughly 12 percent of the population. And black women account for half of all female enlistees, according to figures released by the Department of Defense.

The truth is that the vast majority of people of any racial or ethnic background who volunteer for military service are from the working and lower-middle classes, according to USA Today, The Washington Post and other press reports. For young blacks who have graduated from segregated public schools and who do not want to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to pay for college, there are few other viable ways to prepare for good jobs or pay for college. Just as other generations found the military the only place to work where they could advance on their merits, these young people are finding the military a place where they can realize their dreams. They are patriotic and willing to shoulder a burden that young people from more privileged backgrounds are not assuming.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans united behind Bush. Few could dispute that we needed to find the people who were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the flight over Pennsylvania. But we have to ask ourselves, "What are our forces in Iraq are fighting for?" Is it for the democracy we love because we have the freedom to speak, or something else? I am an American who loves my country precisely because we are supposed to be able to think for ourselves and freely speak our minds.

To me, it is the height of patriotism to care enough about our country to speak out regardless of how unpopular one's viewpoint may be. We cannot lose sight of that or allow the political rhetoric of the moment to make us forget that patriotism isn't unanimity. Often it lives through dissent.

Starita Smith is an award-winning writer and editor based in Denton, Texas, where she is a doctorate student in sociology at Texas Woman's University. She is a former reporter and editor at the Austin American-Statesman, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch and the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune. This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.